The iconic radio talk show host Bob Grant used to say that liberals are the ultimate hypocrites. When it comes to trashing politically conservative women, that is certainly an accurate description.
As we asked previously, regardless of one's political leanings, why is it okay for the left--including HBO's Bill Maher, the one million dollar Obama campaign donor--to smear Sarah Palin,
Michelle Bachmann, and other prominent right-of-center women but the opposite causes the mainstream media to go bananas?
As Prof. William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog writes, "Sexualized, unapologetic attacks on conservative women simply are part of the accepted landscape."
This video from ShePac.com puts it all into perspective:
How much more cable news airtime will this manufactured controversy about Rush Limbaugh's dumb comments about the Georgetown law student/political activist take up?
It's times like these that make us thankful for alternative entertainment such as Netflix streaming.
Whether you like Limbaugh or not, the efforts to force his radio show off the air will likely fail.
At the same time, why is it okay for the left to bad-mouth Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and other right-of-center women while the mainstream media stays silent? [What you hear next is the sound of crickets.]
For example, as many have pointed out, HBO's Bill Maher, who practically has a part-time gig as a CNN co-host, gave one million bucks to the Obama SuperPac.
Given Maher's history of "anti-woman" trash talking, shouldn't there be a media outcry for the Obama campaign to return that cash immediately? Moreover, will Palin (and others similarly situated) be receiving a phone call from the president [more crickets]?
Kirsten Powers, one of the few pundits whose cable news commentary made any sense on Super Tuesday, published a piece at The Daily Beast that makes this very point. Powers, a liberal, discussed her article on FNC:
In this video, two Capitol Hill Democrats who denounced Limbaugh make complete fools of themselves by refusing to condemn Maher's misogynistic outbursts:
Near the end of this interview, Bernard Goldberg talks about how the media ignores personal attacks on conservative women:
Ever wonder how the journalists in the mainstream media look at themselves in the mirror in the morning? For example, the media went nuts because George W. Bush continued his fitness regimen in the White House when he should have been attending to--according to them--more serious matters.
Have they made a peep about the amount of time Obama spends on the links?
According to the White House Dossier blog, Obama's December 26 outing at Marine Corps Base Hawaii was the 90th time he played golf during his presidency (President Bush, in eight years, wasn't even close).
With this one, Obama reaches a new milestone, having gone golfing 90 times in less than three years as president. That’s about three months of golf, given that the excursions
generally take about five hours – much of the useful portion of the day.
What’s
more, it’s the 32nd time he’s been on the links this year, a record for
the president. His 32 outings eclipses the 2010 mark of 30 and is far
ahead of his 2009 tally of 28 rounds as president.
In addition to trotting the very debatable assertion that Obama takes less vacation time than Bush (and virtually ignoring the First Lady's lavish holidays on the taxpayer's dime), the media continues to cover for him in other, more substantive ways. Consider this from RealClearPolitics:
Over the past five months, the Republican presidential candidates
participated in 13 debates where they fielded dozens of penetrating
questions on every major issue facing the nation, and some not so major...
Yet, during all that time, the man they hope to defeat next November has
rarely been asked by news reporters about many of these issues. Since
August, President Obama has held only one formal White House news
conference. That came on Oct. 6, nearly three months ago. It lasted 74
minutes, shorter than any single Republican debate, and the president
was asked 17 questions, most of them softballs on the economy and his
latest legislative proposals to create jobs...
Obama’s ability to avoid tough questions, skate above the fray and look
presidential while his potential successors appear to be futilely
flailing is not by accident. It is by White House design, abetted by a
press corps that seems content with being shut out by the president and
being spoon-fed the message of the day, rather than clamoring for more
chances to ask him questions during this critical time.
Again, the media would be going bananas if a Republican president was ducking press conferences.
Although the infiighting is troubling (and we disagree to some degree with the premise of "flailing"), the GOP debates are only a warmup for what the the Obama reelection campaign a.k.a. the mainstream media will dish out against the eventual Republican nominee. So to the extent that the primary debates are psychologically toughening up and focusing the ultimate nominee, especially when most of America is paying little attention, they can be a good thing.
In a previous post, we mentioned that left-of-center media polemicists and politicians often accuse their right-of-center counterparts of lying even though it is the left that often puts forth disinformation, canned talking points, or other forms of obfuscation. In other words, a classic case of projection. The unprofessional, inappropriate outburst by the formerly obscure South Carolina congressman notwithstanding, nothing has changed. If anything, the left has stepped up its efforts.
So, with that in mind, here is the second installment of our media bias roundup (in no particular order). Again, please feel free to forward additional double-standard examples to us--or in the alternative, let us know if you disagree with our premise. As in Part 1, we include the crickets sound effect (well known to political- and sports-talk radio fans) to signify instances when the so-called mainstream media ignores--primarily for ideological reasons--a legitimate news story.
===================================
Republican lawmaker calls President Obama a liar Media response: saturation coverage, demands for assorted groveling
Democrat lawmakers spend eight years calling President Bush
a liar Media response: crickets
===================================
Republican lawmaker leaves office early to run for higher office Media response: strong denunciation, quitter
Democrat lawmaker stays in office (thereby neglecting
his/her job) while running for higher office Media response: crickets
===================================
Scattered, random offensive signs at "tea party" rallies Media response: focus coverage almost exclusively on
the small percentage of offensive signs
Extensive number of offensive signs at anti-war, anti-capitalsm,
anti-globalism, or other left-of-center demonstrations Media response: crickets
===================================
Right-of-center politician who supports school choice
sends children to public schools Media response: crickets
Left-of-center politician who opposes school choice and
unconditionally supports teachers union sends children to
private school Media response: crickets
===================================
Right-of-center think-tank releases study or representative
of think tank appears on cable news network Media response: makes sure to ID think-tank as conservative
[also raises issues concerning who is funding the organization]
Left-of-center think-tank releases study or representative
appears on cable news network: Media response: no adjective included
in front of think-tank's name--no discussion of funding sources
===================================
Right-of-center candidate runs negative ads Media response: unseemly, undignified, poisonous
of the electorate, "smear machine"
Left-of-center candidate runs negative ads Media response: crickets
===================================
Right-of-center former govt. official makes big
money on lecture tour Media response: greedy, excessive, compromising
Right-of-center former govt. official makes big
money on lecture tour Media response: crickets
===================================
Embarrassing info on the family of right-of-center
politician or activist--or politician him/herself. Media response: major headlines and coverage
Embarrassing info on the family of left-of-center
politician or activist--or politician him/herself. Media response: crickets
===================================
Right-of-center blog/website reader posts offensive
comments. Media response: yet another example of
lack of civility, extremism
Left-of-center blog/website reader posts offensive
comments. Media response: crickets
===================================
Right-of-center politician supports traditional marriage
and/or takes pro-life position Media response: constant mention
Left-of-center politician supports traditional marriage
and/or takes pro-life position Media response:crickets
===================================
Hate crime allegedly committed against media-favored
group Media response: saturation coverage
Hate crime allegedly committed against media-disfavored
group Media response:crickets
===================================
Right-of-center persons regularly mischaracterized as
"racist" Media response: accept caricature at face value
Longest serving Democrat in U.S. Senate is a former
Ku Klux Klan member Media response: crickets
Over the years, but especially recently, one phenomenon that has become profoundly obvious is that left-of-center polemicists tend to accuse right-of-center writers, bloggers and other counterparts of "lying."
But this trend has emerged a classic case of projection, because it is in general those on the left who engage in half-truths, distortions, disinformation or lack of information, taking things out of context, and perhaps what's worse, incuriously accepting at face value virtually any pronouncement from this administration.
We hesitate to use the word lie because that word has been thrown around so much in so many different quarters that it is almost devoid of meaning. [Even Judge Milian too often seems to accuse a litigant of lying when it might be just an instance where two individuals simply have a good-faith difference in perception.]
In her latest Salon essay primarily about the "sick" obsession of this administration, Congress, and what she calls the "liberal lemmings" of the mainstream media, to impose socialism on the medical delivery system, self-described Obama supporter (and Republican critic) Camille Paglia makes reference to the same trend:
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism...
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible....
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.
By the way, tonight would be a good night to rent a DVD, check-in with the Dog Whisperer or Animal Cops if they're on, or engage in recreational reading, or participate in any "healthy" activity other than watching yet another tedious, narcissistic presidential address.
Besides, the lemmings in the mainstream media have already decided for you that this is the greatest speech ever delivered in recorded history.
Physical and mental fitness (and diet) are going to be even more important if socialized medicine gets pushed through against the wishes of the American people. Once that takes effect, we'll need to further emphasize self-sufficient lifestyle choices to avoid winding up in the clutches of what will be a horribly failed system. The lawyers often call this approach “self help.”
Most of the national media (with the exception of one news network, a few newspapers, and talk radio) are too busy being stenographers for the administration and the Democrats to grasp what's really going on. As the New York Post describes:
It's been a hilarious August, watching media supporters of President Obama's health care package puzzle over the obscure motivations of the noncompliant Americans rallying against it...
While the commentariat's condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama's room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren't very keen about the government barging into their lives...
After 11 months of federal bailouts and freakouts, Americans have become bone tired of panicky power grabs from Washington. It's the big government, stupid.
The message of the various Tea Party protests, which predated this summer's ahistorical media panic over town hall "lynch mobs," has been pretty simple, says Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the nonprofit that has helped organize the protests, told Reason magazine this spring. "It was: stop spending so much money, stop borrowing so much money, and stop bailing out people who were irresponsible."
Anyway, the point we're making is that it's all good for the local health club to have at least some of the flat-screen TVs in the cardio area tuned to cable news. But that also means that the tedious Obama permanent campaign gets inflicted on anyone working out on the stationary bikes, stairmasters, and so forth. As Valerie Cherish, in one of her catchphrases from The Comeback, would say, "I don't need to see that!"
The living rooms of America are a different matter: Thank goodness for Animal Planet, the Food Network, NatGeo, and other channels, which so far haven't been compromised or politicized (as far as we know, anyway). Even ESPN sadly is no longer safe from politicization.
With its disappearing market share, the mainstream national news media has found itself in a downward spiral. Unfortunately the big media still sets the news agenda to a large degree. With some exceptions mentioned above, most of the America media is blatantly in the tank for the current administration and the Democrats generally (with the exception of Hillary Clinton of 2008 vintage). As we've previously noted, in the year 2008, the fourth estate went morally as well as financially bankrupt.
And while we often try to avoid the nauseating administration lapdogs that dominate most of the national media precincts, we're fortunate that excellent websites and blogs keep readers on the top of the latest one-sided excesses in electronic and print media bias--so that we don't always actually have to watch. In general, taking a vacation from the news cycle can also be very beneficial.
Those aforementioned websites also do a fantastic job in covering developments that most of the national journalists avoid at all costs.
Our view is that all politicians regardless of affiliation should be treated with the same level of scrutiny. With that in mind, we made a list in no particular order of how the media reports on--or not--equivalent political events or issues.
Please feel free to forward additional double-standard examples to us, as this list is by no means exhaustive, and we will otherwise continue to add to it.
As a further public service, we include the crickets sound effect (well known to political- and sports-talk radio fans) to signify instances when the so-called mainstream media ignores--primarily for ideological reasons--a legitimate news story.
===================================
Bush fires 9 U.S. Attorneys. Media response: Headlines, demands for investigation, saturation coverage
Clinton fires 93 U.S. Attorneys. Media response: crickets
===================================
Bush appoints Texas associates to Executive Branch positions: Media response: blatant cronyism, corruption
Obama appoints Chicago associates to Executive Branch positions: Media response: crickets
===================================
Bush politicizes Justice Department: Media response:
saturation coverage culminating in high-level investigation
Obama politicizes Justice Department: Media response: crickets
====================================
Republican lawmaker caught in scandal. Media response::
saturation coverage; mention party affiliation in first sentence
Democrat lawmaker caught in scandal. Media response:
never mention party affiliation, assuming story isn't spiked in the first place
====================================
Bush works out, plays golf, goes on vacation. Media response::
obsessive waste of time, shirking his duties, insensitive in time
of war
Obama works out, plays golf, goes on vacation. Media response:
a glorious affirmation of youthful vitality in the presidency
====================================
Nancy Reagan wears designer clothes: Media response::
corruption, decadence and insensitivity in White House
Michelle Obama wears designer clothes: Media response:
A glorious affirmation of style and glamour in the White House
=====================================
Domestic and (international) protests during Bush administration. Media response: citizens exercising their freedom of speech,
legitimate form of public discourse
Ordinary citizens confronting lawmakers at healthcare townhalls during Obama administration: Media response: angry mobs, paid organizers, racists, brownshirts, "astroturf"
Corollary: Democrats send busloads of union and
ACORN members to pack healthcare town halls. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Bush administration engages in counter-terrorism surveillance: Media response: assault on civil liberties, shredding the Constitution
Obama administration collects names and email addresses of
those citizens opposed to its healthcare reform polices: Media response: crickets
Extensive ACORN multiple state vote fraud in 2008 election. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Cheney meets privately with energy industry officials. Media response: corrupt practices in White House,
demands for investigation
Obama meets privately with pharmaceutical industry officials. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Bush compared to Hitler, caricatured, etc. Media response:
citizens exercising freedom of speech
Obama compared to Hitler, caricatured, etc. Media response:
citizens engaging in racist acts
=====================================
Bush invokes God, refers to his his religious faith. Media response:
violation of church and state, religious zealotry
Obama invokes God, refers to his his religious faith. Media response: crickets
=====================================
Extensive media focus on John McCain's health and age
(even though age discrimination is against the law).
John McCain releases his medical records.
Coverage of health of Bill Clinton (obesity) or
Barack Obama (lifetime cigarette smoker). Neither
candidate releases medical records. Media response: You guessed it--crickets
======================================
Sarah Palin's background in Alaska. Media response:
Sends hundreds of reporters to dig up dirt on the governor.
Obama's background in Chicago. Media response: crickets
======================================
Sarah Palin's gaffes and misstatements (real or imagined). Media response: saturation coverage
Obama/Bidens gaffes and misstatements (real). Media response: crickets
======================================
NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell criticizes Sarah Palin for
neglecting her family in favor of seeking the vice presidency.
NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell (or anyone else) omits mentioning
that she (O'Donnell) has three small children at home.
=======================================
John Kerry's Vietnam Service. Media response:
constantly mentioned during 2004 presidential campaign
Bob Dole's bravery on the WWII battlefield. Media response during 1996 presidential
campaign: crickets
=======================================
Media in general celebrates/promotes teen promiscuity
Gov. Palin's daughter becomes pregnant: Media response:
Teen promiscuity is no longer worth celebrating or promoting
